Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The World-Wide Laser Industry Has Recovered Quickly

Despite a 30% dip in 2009, the world-wide laser industry recovered over 27% in 2010, to $6.37 billion; it is expected to grow over 12% in 2011 to $7.1 billion, according to the LFW Annual Laser Market Report.

As shown in the chart, 2/3 of the market is in the Communications and Materials Processing industries.

Diode lasers amount for 51% of the market and non-diode lasers account for 49%. One of the largest growth areas is fiber lasers, experiencing a 41% growth in 2010 and an even greater rate in 2011.

The demand for new laser technicians continued to outstrip the supply by over 4:1. Colleges report that 2010 grads received multiple job offers again in 2010. Job prospects for this year also look very good.

2 comments:

Great! Pretty informative post! Thanks for posting. Laser diodes are used in most laser pointers because of their small size. This also makes them great for DVD and CD players because both use small lasers to read their disks. However, laser diodes generally do not produce much power, making them far too weak to be used industrially.

Welcome to Dan Hull's Photonics Blog!

OP-TEC, the National Center for Optics and Photonics Education, is funded by the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. We are working with secondary, postsecondary and industry partners to increase and sustain our nation’s capacity to produce photonics technicians.